


20qm

by kitty_shcherbatskaya



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, F/F, POV Second Person, Reconciliation, Relationship Problems, i hate myself :)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 13:20:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5587222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitty_shcherbatskaya/pseuds/kitty_shcherbatskaya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Trotz jedem Krach, allem Anlass zu flieh'n, würde ich mich lieber mit dir streiten,<br/>als wen ander's zu lieben."</p>
<p>All's fair in love and war - and when it comes to Laura and you, how can you possibly tell the one from the other?</p>
            </blockquote>





	20qm

**Author's Note:**

> inspired entirely by 20qm by Casper because that song makes me wanna bawl. It doesn't translate particularly well but there's an attempt here: http://lyricstranslate.com/en/20qm-20m%C2%B2.html
> 
> the summary quote is from it and it means roughly "despite every row and all the reasons to leave, I'd rather fight with you than love someone else". :))))
> 
> also it's a bit more of a character study than I originally intended so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ sorry but i just highkey love carmilla karnstein

The sun is just rising over the Spree when you stumble out of the U-Bahn station at Hermannstraße, with a toolbox that is an awkward rectangular ball and chain on your arm. You’re sure it would look beautiful if you weren’t at the end of a twelve hour shift spent under a filthy East German train engine that should have been scrapped twenty five years ago (along with the government that had commissioned it). Getting back to your shitty apartment, falling into the shower and sleeping is the only thing keeping one foot moving in front of the other (you miss out the part where you have to get up at sundown and do the whole crappy thing again).

How your stepmother would laugh to see you now.

You're moving against the flow heading into work, shoving and jostling and glaring your way through, when you notice her. She's crouched on the pavement futilely spinning the front wheel of a bike that's apparently breathed its last, and she's right in your way. You're forced to stop.

You snap rough words at her, and when her head jerks up your breath catches, because she's somehow like that one time you went to the museum of fine art in Leipzig and stood in a room that vaulted impossibly high to a rain splattered sky and finally knew what it was to breathe air that was clean. 

She tugs at a pedal forlornly as she replies, the strangeness passes, and you find yourself dawdling on the pavement even as you know you should just walk away.  

So you raise a single eyebrow and let out a clipped " _Tja."_

Her face twists; it takes your heart with it. And then those big brown eyes fall on your toolbox, and brighten. There's something there that you're not used to seeing - something like warmth.

So you hunker down next to her and see how the chain is all fucked up and it's a job, you tell her, that any repair shop will do for eighty euro or so. She blanches. Her hands are gesticulating rather wildly as she goes through the scenario aloud and your legs are just so _tired_. You straighten and she follows, apologizing, and you finally give in to the need to send your eyes to the heavens, along with what’s left of your dignity. You hold out your hand.

_You fucking sap_. She's still looking at you like you're going to bash her with your toolbox and you sigh, reaching for the damn bike with exaggerated slowness.

Then she's all stumbled _danke schön_ s and awkward, shy smiles and even with the bulky metal bike frame on your shoulder, pedals digging into your hip and waiting impatiently for her to give you your phone back, you feel the coils of irritation in your body beginning to unwind for the first time all week. Her clearly learned German malfunctions a little and she sees you off with a self-conscious smile, almost forgetting her backpack in her bashful, confused gratitude. You glance at your phone. _Laura_ , reads your new contact, with a little bicycle emoji at the end. You roll your eyes again, even though no one's around to see, and later in the yard when the damned bike's chain is finally fixed, whirring sweetly as you give its pedals a spin, it's music to your ears.

 

\--

You'd thought that the students that filled Berlin's bars and clubs and S-Bahns were entitled, arrogant brats; and the foreign ones? Doubly so. They flashed their money in stupid hipster cafes and lounged around everywhere they weren't wanted shouting their opinions on things that you didn’t even know it was possible to have an opinion on. They looked at you like you were something on the bottom of their shoe while you kept the bahn lines running that half the time they didn't even pay for.

Now you're sat opposite one of them in a cafe behind Hackescher Markt and she's laughing at your stupid story about that time your co-worker Kirsch almost electrocuted himself trying to tempt a squirrel off the lines.

Laura is Canadian. She's in her second year of a Politics and International Relations course at Humboldt. She writes for the English edition of the student newspaper and runs her own blog and apparently she likes to thank people for bringing her bike back to life by taking them to lunch at four o'clock in the afternoon on a Saturday.

The bike is running like new, she had said, which is impressive because she’d bought it third hand off a stoner behind the aula. You shake your head in wonder at how she even survived adolescence and she launches into an indignant defence of her apparently somewhat precarious methods of existence. You're barely listening because she glows and, even after the sun has set and the cafe has locked its doors and the first snow of the season starts to fall, her light only burns brighter.

 

\--

You'd thought that was that. But when she texts you less than a week later in raptures at the ice rink on Alexanderplatz, and you point out that it goes up every single December and its novelty for you has long worn off, she demands you get down there ASAP and see it anew.

You sigh, and put your book to one side, and the thought of disobeying her excited order never enters your head. When you meet her in the dark, her hands wrapped tightly around a hot mug of mulled wine, you have to admit, the scene is a whole lot more beautiful than your cynical eyes had ever allowed. As she drags you onto the rink, tottering, holding herself up with your strength, you laugh and let yourself tug her along the ice, further into your space, further into you.

She kisses you sweetly that night and she tastes like wine and distant summer. You grieve, because this is surely the beginning of the end for you both, and then you smother her apologies and kiss her back.

 

\--

You'd meant to delete her number after she flew back to distant Toronto for the Christmas holidays. But you were busy the whole time (snow on the lines meant you were pulling seventy hour weeks), and when your phone rings from next to your pillow at 5 in the morning in the middle of January, you fall on her name like it's what you've been waiting for all month. You hear the announcements go off in the background, muffling her voice, and you tell her to get out of the airport, take a fucking breath and catch some sleep. She asks if you're free tonight. You tell her yes before you can stop yourself and she tells you, laughing through her fatigue, to think of a date.

You take her to the Polish restaurant three streets from your apartment and impress her with your casual, fast Polish. When you point out that you grew up as the only German kid in your tower block outside Leipzig and it's not that impressive, she blushes and changes the subject. She's jetlagged and her German is all kinds of rusty after the month away but that doesn't seem to matter as she relates how her great uncle Larry spent Christmas Eve drinking half a bottle of whiskey and subsequently crying into the Christmas tree, and you're enraptured all over again. She burns even brighter tonight and you know that you're helpless to resist those flames.

She comes back to yours and you find out that hers is a fire that you can't extinguish, even when you have her hair spilling across your pillows and her body is wet and trembling and calling for you. You surrender equally to her touch and as the flames are fanned around you and she is on you and in you and everything to you, you realise that the inferno is not such a bad way to go.

 

\-- 

You get a surprise when she takes you to an amateur theatre production in Friedrichshain and when the curtain falls with finality and the whole cast bursts out to see her with a smile you know it won’t be the good kind. They talk about lighting and angles and reception and the muse - or at least that’s what she tells you later because when the English that you don’t understand falls to your ears you excuse yourself into the chilly spring air for a cigarette.

It’s a little piece of New York City in eastern Berlin and it’s a world you don’t know and aren’t part of - could never have been part of. When she comes out to see where you are you’re angry at her. When you leave alone a few minutes later there’s tears in her eyes and a taste in your mouth that's more bitter than your smoke.

She comes over two days later and you don’t turn her away. Afterwards, when your head is on her chest and she’s running gentle fingers through your damp hair, she whispers her apologies and you know that in this moment you’ve already forgiven her.

You wish you were stronger.

 

\-- 

She cancels the date she’d arranged for you both by text and your heart sinks.

But when you give in to temptation and call her she sounds rough and her voice echoes strangely around a room that can’t be her bedroom, and she has to pause to throw up in the middle of her sentence.

So instead of bowling in the multiplex south of town you end up climbing the stairs to her apartment for the first time, your nerves almost swallowed by your worry for her. It’s a new and foreign sensation and you’re not a hundred percent sure you want it there.

But she wants you there. So you let her head rest in your lap as you read to her, fingers stroking her soft hair, and when she tries to apologize for cancelling the date you shrug and point out plainly that you get to see her anyway. She’s already flushed with illness but she blushes some more - and runs for the toilet, which is how you end up holding her hair and rubbing her back as her body rebels against her. She sinks into your strong hard arms and you suspect you should mind more about the smell, the time, the worry.

For the next two days you go straight to hers from work and you try not to think about how strange it feels that your life no longer seems to be centred quite on you.

 

\-- 

When you get the news she is the first person you run to, and she strokes your back and dries the traitorous tears that were daring enough to escape your iron shell. She offers to go with you to the funeral. But your worlds, after all, are different, and to bring something as good as Laura into the grip of the Morgan-Karnsteins would be akin to bringing a lamb to the wolf pack.

So alone you get the train and stand under sullen May skies south of Leipzig to see your father for the last time.

When your stepmother stands - sniffs - talks - your palms sweat and your hand feels empty without another to hold. When she talks about the relief, the mercy of an end to long pain, you want to scream and fight and make her feel what pain truly was. You light a cigarette right there at the graveside instead and make belligerent eye contact every time her imperious gaze sweeps the assembled mourners like her own personal subjects. 

You don’t argue with her. You run again, get drunk in a shitty bar outside of town and remember five shots down that your father is dead and the last words you said to him were that you didn’t need him and never would. What a terrible lie.

You miss your train back to Berlin and when you wake up the next morning on a schoolfriend’s couch stinking of vomit and smoke and sweat and debating how much vodka would finish the job, there’s eight missed calls from Laura to remind you why you’d woken up at all. But you're still getting used to the idea of having something to go back to. 

She knows something’s gone terribly wrong and she skips a lecture to meet you on the platform that afternoon. When she hugs you tight, uncaring of your ruined makeup and dubious smell, she tells you that you’re better together and a traitorous part of you agrees. 

It’s the first time that she takes you to hers and as she gently pushes your shambling hungover self in her shower and her fingers massage her fragrant shampoo into your scalp, you think on how easy it is - to give up a part of yourself. Dozing in her bed while she goes out to her university, you can understand why anyone would want to make themselves incomplete, if she was the puzzle piece they were missing.

But you know it would take far more than one puzzle piece to make you whole again. It would take more than Laura could possibly give you.

 

\-- 

You take her to the pub one warm Sunday night at the start of June and introduce her to your friends. Laura seems surprised by what greets her - all men, the youngest a kid on his Praktikum and the oldest a grizzled 55 year old who's never left Wedding and is stubbornly holding onto his job on the tracks despite the fact it’s taken four fingers off him. They speak quickly and with thick accents, and laugh good-naturedly at Laura’s mispronunciations, and when _Tatort_ comes on and the pub quietens with anticipation, she squeezes your hand and whispers in your ear that she thinks they’re great. 

Dieter is from a different Germany. A one where a few missing fingers was no reason to quit your work, a one where women didn’t work the tracks, and certainly a one where they didn’t love other women. You’d hoped he wouldn’t give Laura a hard time. But she is charming, and open, and humble, and he's soon far more interested in what goes on in distant Canada, and the distant halls of Humboldt, to care about that. When he snorts and asks if all the other students are taking on charity cases too you snap out a retort and know that it will be okay.

The guys are disappointed when you leave at the end of _Tatort_. Laura agrees patiently to come back and see them soon and you feel a lot warmer than the tentative start to summer should allow. You even pretend not to notice when she sniffs apprehensively at her clothes, now smoky from the bar, and she almost keeps the condescension out of her voice when she asks you later whether they all do the same job as you. 

It’s not her fault, after all. This is all as new to her as her books and her essays and her thoughts are to you.

 

\--

She tells her dad that she’s staying an extra month in the summer to work on a project. Instead she soaks up the sun on Templehof Park long into the evening with your head in her lap (when your shifts allow) and you get so used to seeing her wrapped up in your sheets that her eventual leaving will make the flat seem bare and gutted. So you take her to a small resort town on the north coast for a few days, joining the droves of other normal, working-class Germans from the eastern side on their annual holiday, and seeing her windburned and tanned with hair which quickly becomes tangled and coarse from the salt does something to your chest that you’ve never felt before. So when you’re lying on the empty beach together before the dawn, the exhilaration and the thrill only partially snuffed out by your afterglow, you think nothing of turning to her and asking her to move in with you when she comes back in September.

Her eyes are drowsy and blissed out, and maybe it’s her orgasm talking or maybe it’s something else when she nods and kisses you long and open-mouthed.

You tell her you love her. She kisses you again.

 

* * *

 

Without her there you feel somewhat superfluous and you realise that, even though your work takes up so much time, your mind rattles empty and restless and your existence yawns out vast and gaping before your eyes. So every moment you’re not up to your neck in engine grease, you read and you dream and you plan. You spend a lot on the apartment. New floors, new paint, new furniture from IKEA. At the end of it you look around with some pride and drink a beer on the unwrapped couch on your own.

You don’t talk to her as much as you’d expected. When the time difference and your shifts aren’t in the way, Laura’s internet can’t be relied on (apparently rural Canada isn’t at all conducive to the internet revolution) and it’s not like you can afford to call now that your chairs all match. 

Occasionally you pick up one of the books you’d heard her and her friends go on about. Then you put it down again unopened.

You never quite get around to starting her holiday viewing recommendation list and you regret that a little when you get ranted at through your laptop screen over just how groundbreaking Xavier Dolan's entire body of work is. You attribute your growing apprehension over her arrival date to those unread titles stuck to the front of your fridge.

But the nerves coursing through you at the arrivals gate take you off guard. You find yourself feeling strangely faint and horribly weak as you scan strange faces lighting up at people you don’t know and don’t care about.

When her familiar form fights through the doors you had expected to breathe easy again. Instead you almost suffocate, barely able to raise your arm to get her attention, right up until her eyes land on you and her lips form that soft, slow smile that you know is just for you. Her case falls over and crushes someone’s toes when she throws her arms around you and kisses you, hard, but you don’t hear their yelp of pain.

The rest of the night you will remember in snatches; it is both too much and too intense, and to hold her again after six weeks apart seems to have acted like a drug to your system, leaving that which will remain too vivid and too loud and too raw.

Laura pushing you against the door of your apartment and kissing you hungrily.

The long perfect V of her legs, falling open in front of you, just for you.

Her, moving inside of you, grasping, greedy, dragging the pleasure from your throat like only she is allowed to.

Her laugh in the predawn light, sudden and loud, when you admit how long it took you, the engineer, to put this damn IKEA bed frame together, only to put it through the ultimate stress test on its first night as both of yours.

Even as she curls up against you, exhausted by her travel and her emotion, you’ve never felt so alive. You remember holding your breath under the waves at the Heiligendamm resort, teasing her until she came looking. The feeling of bursting out of the cool water and sucking in air, watching her swim over to take you in her arms, is the only thing that compares.

When you actually talk the next day over cured meats and coffee, she asks you what you’d been up to. You tell her the truth - nothing that matters now she’s here.

 

\--

You wonder how you’ve survived the last 24 years of your life without this. Awkwardly brushing your teeth around her in the bathroom. Getting yelled at for leaving your massive filthy work boots on the laminate flooring. Arguments over the TV that usually end with someone’s pants off and the program reduced to background noise.

Even coming in from a night shift where half the lines have gone down thanks to electric storms and you can’t tell up from down is made better, you think blearily, when Laura’s hands land chastely and softly on you in the shower and she leaves you in bed for her lectures with a kiss.

For the first time, the angry restless voice that has been your companion since your mother died is silent and the peace is nice. It’s a peace that invites time: the time to stop and look at the sun rising over the tracks near the Wannsee; the time to stop by a florist on the way home and pick a bouquet, bursting in colour, that you know she’ll love; the time to think on her sliding in her socks down the hallway and wonder if she could possibly be any easier to love.

You never ask for it back. You’ve grown to appreciate silence after all. 

 

\--

One rainy dull Saturday, over breakfast at some cafe she chooses in the centre, Laura suggests getting a dog. Your heart stops and she laughs at her own joke.

You’re only half listening because the thought - of the future, here, contained at this tiny table for two over American pancakes, is so scary that you have to stop yourself from bolting.

You picture her in ten years, curled up on the sofa with a dog - a big one, you think, a one that could take her on - and feverishly typing at her laptop. It'll no doubt be something that's going to be huge, some article, some journal that she’d been obsessing over for months, because she knows it's going to be good, so you do too.

Imagine her redecorating the small bedroom in your flat, hair pulled back and paint up to her elbows, absently shooing the dog, old and docile now, out of the chaos.

You picture her with a child in her arms, a little bundle of blankets and innocence and _time_ to invest together, and the tears in her eyes glisten as she beckons you to see it - your child.

And then you wonder if you’d still be coming in from the trains, from the press, from the stench at all hours of the day and night, and your mind judders to a halt.

She is going to fly. And you’d never even grown your wings. 

 

\-- 

This semester is tough, she tells you, and you see less and less of her as the nights grow longer and the weather colder. Between her workload and your hours your time together becomes more precious.

It doesn’t bother you that your life consists of work and her. There is a time before, when there was just you and the goddamn toolbox, and a time after, which could never fade to that empty barren cycle.

But she grows tired and restless. She does too much, tries too much, and when you tell her that, she shakes her head and says that that’s how uni is. You wish you knew enough to contradict her.

She arranges a newspaper meeting at your apartment and you agree. You still don’t really know any of Laura’s friends. This would be good for her, you think: to not worry so much about what she perceives as your loneliness.

(She forgets easily that the friendships of your work may be brief and terse and subject to the strain of your hard manual work, but they are real and they are forged of the same steel that you bind the railroads with, that you temper and beat and tame together.)

So on Wednesday night you come in to a collection of seven or eight of them cramped around the coffee table, Macs open, phones buzzing, voices raised excitedly. You fix yourself a coffee and at first you just listen from the kitchen.

Laura introduces you to them and you take the curious looks coolly. The one whose presence you feel most is a tall redhead with attitude. She reminds you even before she’s opened her mouth of the jumped up, restless teens who come into work on the first weeks of their apprenticeships and you wonder if the university knows to put kids like this in their place before their egos put the job at risk.

They invite you to join them and you squeeze in next to Laura to observe. Feeling the redhead’s eyes on you, you slip your arm around her waist and she leans in, and you feel smug (but also like you can breathe for the first time all day). Her friends speak in a mixture of English and German, and you listen to what you can understand and reply briefly when someone asks you a direct question.

As the hours while by they slip more into English and their conversation begins to drift beyond your comprehension. You haven’t heard about the new exhibition at the Kunstpalast in Neukölln (and to be honest you aren’t sure what Russian rayism is). Your hands twitch and you light a cigarette right there at the table, ignoring the looks that the smoke receives. You wonder when they’re going to leave.

It’s the redhead who asks you something about your work. When you reply you’re aware of her carefully blank expression and when she says something to the blond boy next to her in English your temper snaps. It’s only Laura next to you that keeps your mouth shut and instead you walk abruptly to your shared room and shut yourself in because the angry voice is buzzing in your head again and you aren’t good enough.

A part of you hopes that Laura will come and see you and silence it. She doesn’t.

It’s another hour before the flat is empty of loud, overenounciated voices that pierce the walls and Laura sighs as she comes in. You’re pretending to read a novel that Peter from work lent you but there’s too many words bouncing against your skull for you to concentrate.

When she dares to ask you snap back. When she tries to break through you retreat to higher walls.

So you sit in stalemate.

 

\-- 

Just before Christmas you take her back down to Alexanderplatz, where it all started, and she’s got better at German, and you’ve both got better at skating, but apparently you still haven’t learned to share and when she runs into a pair of English students on their year abroad that she knows a little and is too polite to not invite them to share a mulled wine, you wonder whether it would have just been better to stay in.   

You’re quiet and she apologizes and kisses you sweetly after they leave, and it reminds you of your very first kiss a year ago and is enough for tonight.

You have to admit, she still looks enchanting under the lights.

 

\--

The new financial quarter brings the news that you’re missing targets at work.

Well, not you specifically. Every unit is getting reshuffled, streamlined, polished to try and keep profits wide and executives happy. Of course that means that you, the workforce, suffer.

You go up to a three-shift pattern with mandatory overtime. The money is good. And it's only until you're all back on top of the numbers anyway. It gives Laura a chance to get some peace to study, too, so really it's hardly the end of the world.

You come in from a 14-hour monster of a shift and slide in next to Laura, who is sleeping soundly. You kiss her bare shoulder and pull her into your arms.

When her mouth on your nipple drags you into consciousness barely three hours later, you first feel irritation and pull her back to you. You’re tired and your week-long headache, just beginning to fade, is threatening to roar back into force. But, stubborn, she presses her lips and tongue to the hollow of your throat, and her fingers slip down between your legs to tease.

Isn't it obvious how embarrassed you are? But when you snap out a refusal, unable to control the frustration that's bubbling under the surface, her face is hurt and she gets up abruptly.

And when you try and fix it, she yells.

She storms out to university that morning without a kiss goodbye and you find that further sleep eludes you.

 

\-- 

The meetings at your apartment continue. You’re at work more often than not. If not, you make sure you’ve got somewhere else to be.

Laura doesn’t like it. And you bristle at the implication that the company she keeps is somehow better than the company you have instead. So on the Wednesdays you’re on day shift you play pool with Peter and the guys.

And you start coming back drunk. Just like them.

She goes to bed early and you’re presented with her back.

 

\--

She offers to teach you English and you agree, because you miss her.

So the two of you sit in your pajamas on a rare Sunday morning uninterrupted while she takes you through numbers and sounds that people like you only know from television shows and radio hits.

But Robin Schulz remixes don’t prepare you for the almost-forgotten slog of learning and you feel so infantile and useless and stupid that after an hour and a half of stuttering over the _w_ in want and the _th_ in there and the _ei_ in eight you stalk into the bathroom and slam the door behind you.

You tell her after your shower, skin rubbed red raw, that someone like you doesn’t need to know English and that you don’t have time to sit around imitating her sounds all day.

She doesn’t even argue and your relief is tempered by burning shame. The two of you find yourselves making love instead, slow and languid on the couch.

Later though, Laura asks why you never went to university.

She can’t leave well alone and you force yourself not to snap out a defensive answer. You tell her that your school didn’t put people into academic study and that you were trained towards the vocational skills all your life.

You don’t tell her that you dropped out when your father got sick and your stepmother got sicker in the head.

 

\-- 

22 isn’t a milestone.

But it’s Laura’s birthday and you buy her an expensive, delicate necklace with all the money your extra shifts are bringing in. She puts it on with reverence and her eyes are so warm when they meet yours in the mirror, and it’s all still so worth it, you find yourself thinking. You press a kiss to her shoulder.

You go to the evening performance of _Equus_ she's been raving about and spend your meal afterwards debating hotly whether the horse cult represented religion or insanity or both. Laura’s all fired up and you love to push her like this, probe her, see how she thinks because everything about her continues to fascinate you.

You have to excuse yourself to go to the bathroom and you smile a little at your reflection. When you take your seat again, Laura gives you her soft smile. “You’re back”, she says. 

But the next night her friends from the university drag her out and you rattle around the empty apartment, bouncing loudly off the walls and trying to read the yellow Reclam text you picked up from a charity shop. You haven't opened a book like this since high school.

She doesn’t get back until after four and you get up out of bed when you hear her. She’s brought the redhead back and they’re slurring loudly in English as you make a sound of disgust and push your uninvited guest onto the couch. The neighbours have made noise complaints before, but this time it's nothing to do with Laura's volume in the bedroom as she unravels at your touch. She's giggly and mischievous but you’re going to work in two and a half hours and are in no mood to indulge her.

You see her friend sleeping like the dead on your way out. You think of them having breakfast together in your kitchen. You scowl.

Everyone avoids you at work the whole day.

You confront her about it in the evening and when she apologizes, you raise your voice.

She tells you you’re not listening.

You tell her you don’t want to see the redhead.

And, finally, she gets as angry as you and you feel justified.

 

\-- 

You don’t see the redhead any more. But you see Laura less and less too and by God, you’ve never wanted to keep tabs on her, but you can’t run from the fact that you’re not there enough, you’re not smart enough, you’re not exciting enough for her anymore, and that she’s realising it too.

So you work more. You’ll save it up, buy you both a holiday, get the fuck out of here before you lose her entirely.

You don’t tell her. And suddenly you’re looking at city breaks in Barcelona and Rome and Budapest and trying to find the dates to fit your holidays and her exams when she texts you to tell you to wait up, because she has news.

She gets in and kisses you quickly on the lips. You’re nervous; you’re right to be, because her father is flying to Berlin at exactly the time you wanted to take her away and you know that there’s nothing you can do now.

She’s full of plans and days and schedules and when you raise your head and tell her you don’t want to meet him she looks like she’s been slapped. And you feel worse but your words get confused in your mouth and with every graceless attempt to explain her eyes get harder and harder.

She tells you to grow up.

You tell her to back off.

All the arguments that you two have been having have prepared you for this because the shouting is worse than it’s ever been. But once you’ve started you can’t stop; you don't understand why but you're more furious that you've been since you lost your mom and the two of you can’t even fuck the anger out this time. After she comes with a slew of English swear words and tears staining her cheeks, she gets up like she can't stand to be there with you anymore and the sobs you hear from the bathroom are the only thing that you dream about - hours and hours in the darkness and her hurt.

You don't know when you'll sleep well again.

 

\--

You come back from Wednesday pool stumbling and angry. You’re always angry after a drink at the minute and it feels like shit but it’s also a feeling so you keep going back.

They’re still here.

This is your apartment.

When the blond boy’s been talking too long you ask him if it’s hard being a pretentious ass all day or whether he gives himself a break now and again.

The sudden silence is worth it and you wonder if smashing your half-full whiskey glass would be overkill. 

Suddenly there’s a lot of talking and a lot of English and a lot of standing and Laura’s hand is on your shoulder but you shrug it off and let rip and it feels good to pull them all apart. 

Another boy gets in your face. His expression is arrogant and his voice is loud, and you don't understand his language but you sure as hell get his tone so you punch him square in the jaw, with all your frustration and all your anger and all of your _not good enough_ , and he drops like a stone.

They clear out of the apartment pretty quickly after that and Laura is screaming at you louder than you’d ever thought possible. It hurts your head.

You drain your tumbler and point out that he was a pretentious ass, and she looks at you like you’re a stranger and shuts herself in the spare room.

You think on that as you’re lying alone in the spinning room and laugh to yourself at the irony because tonight was the most _you_ night you’d had in years. Maybe Laura just doesn’t know you at all. 

 

\--

You know what it would have felt like, now, if you’d stayed under the water last summer at Heiligendamm when she'd come looking, how your lungs would have screamed and your limbs would have thrashed, and the thoughts in your head would have emptied to a long, wordless plea and the yawning darkness.

Laura is leaving.

Her case is packed (she’d never had that much anyway and it was like, you think bitterly, she knew she wasn’t staying long).

She can’t deal with you anymore. With this.

She says she feels like you never trusted her at all and you’re not sure how wrong she is because you’ve learned that trust means so many more things than monogamy.

You’re silent and her voice breaks as she asks if you’re going to say anything.

When you say all you can think she throws back her head and laughs bitterly. She pushes past you and tells you she’ll drop the keys off after she’s sure she has everything.

She doesn’t love you back, then.

You will never make that mistake again.

 

* * *

 

Your life doesn’t walk out the door with Laura.

You work more. You read more. Hell, you take the money you were going to take her to Barcelona with and go yourself.

You have a lot of casual sex, and capture a lot of mediocre photos. When you get back and flick through them on your phone at work, though, you can’t remember a single detail of any of it.

Since there’s nothing to remember any more, you drink.

 

\--

You don’t have Facebook. The guys let you use their profile to see her though. She’s changed her cover and profile pictures at least three times since leaving you. You lap up every one of them and then chuck their phones back with a caustic remark.

You don’t care after all. Just checking she’s not dead.

 

\--

You get a call when you’re trying to relax in the break room on graveyard shift. 3:50 in the morning and your phone lights up with her name and you can’t even identify all the hopes and the fears that fly through your mind.

They're all far too much for you to handle and the phone rings out to a voicemail which you almost delete unopened.

Turns out she’s drunk and you should hang up but to hear her voice again is the most delicious of agonies.

She misses you. She wishes things were different. Maybe in time you’ll both be ready for each other.

Her voice breaks and the call goes dead. You hang up and stare at a screen that's as blank as your mind. So you throw your mug against the wall and it smashes.

Now it looks like you.

 

\--

Your stepmother calls and you spend a week back in Leipzig, away from everything that could remind you of her. Your brother is overjoyed to see you and you wish you felt the same but he is a cunning, ambitious boy who has planned his future to meticulous detail and the two of you couldn’t be more different.

The kids you grew up with know you better but they still tiptoe around you as though you will break at the slightest impact, like the blown glass of the old ornaments on their shelves. But you were never glass - you are hard as iron and twice as brittle.

They succumb and you drag them back to the bars, back to the boxing rings, back to the bonfires and street races but they pale before the flames that are eating you up and after you leave the hospital with bandages around your knuckles and a gash over your eye they let you drift.

It’s freeing in a way. When there’s no one to remind you of the consequences of your actions, they fade into the background noise. Drowned out by your familiar, comforting, angry companion. 

Stepmother sees you back on the train to Berlin personally. She doesn’t say “Don’t come back” - but her cold hands and colder embrace and coldest eyes say it all for you.

You know you don’t care. You embrace the reminder that you’re broken.

 

\--

Peter punches you in the face one late summer evening around the back of the pub and the first thought that follows is that the sky looks prettier from this angle.

But then it _hurts_ and you can’t even hit back because this man was your first friend at work and you’ve met his little girl and accepted _Lebkuchen_ baked by his smiling, harried wife and he’s looking at you with all the pain that his fist commanded etched into the lines of his face. It’s embarrassing for you to watch when the tears spill from his eyes and you struggle up to - what? Help him? 

He doesn’t need your help. You need his.

And it’s true, the more you tell yourself that this is who you are the less real you feel, the less sure you are that you are anything at all beyond a whole lot of fissures patched together with regret and fuelled by the desire to _consume_ -

You could shrug his hand from your shoulder, tune out his words to more background noise, find another bar, another girl, another fight.

Or you could listen and you could find something new to try to fill in those cracks. Something that leaves a better taste in your mouth than the opportunities you never took and the person you never treated properly.

 

\--

Your textbook middle child syndrome was something you haven’t had to think about in years. But Mattie looks so out of place in your kitchen, pouring cheap Belarusian vodka down the sink with a disgusted expression and a coat worth three months of your pay, that the bitter memories overcome you with more clarity than anything else that’s entered your mind since April.

She flew in from Paris the day after you called her, with an ice-pack slapped on your jaw and Peter's stern warning buzzing around your ears. You’re pleased. You’re scared. But you’re not surprised, not really.

Mattie’s always had your back. You’re still learning that.

She stays longer than you expect and certainly longer than you deserve. She takes you back to dance lessons and you might not be able to see her as your partner brings you smartly into a turn that sets your heart racing, but you can feel her smile on your back as you focus not inwards, not on yourself and all the things that have gone wrong with you but rather on the music, on your steps, on the sense of being part of something beautiful. 

You’re sitting in a cafe at four in the afternoon on a Saturday in a scene that is creepingly familiar, and Mattie finally, gently, asks you why Laura left. It’s when you’re explaining about the work, and the moods, and her friends and your friends, that you realise Laura's is the only face out of them all that you can still see clearly, still hold onto.

And you finally tell Mattie the truth: that you miss her so much, and that every time you wake up alone is like her leaving all over again. Every time you hear a laugh that’s truly happy you remember you haven’t heard hers in months. Every time you reach for a hand that’s not there your fist seems to curl around the handle of the heavy suitcase that sat by your door instead.

Her eyes are filled with pity and when she phones work and extends her holiday, filling your living room with the authoritative tones of another language you don’t understand, you don’t say thank you. She’s not here for your thanks.

 

\-- 

You’re starting to live again.

You suspect you’ll never love again - how can you when she still has all of you? - but you can, at least, exist as more than half of a whole that doesn’t fit together, that constitutes two magnetic norths whose very natures keep them from ever working as one. 

You’re watching the late night repeat of _Galileo_ in the fuzzy socks that she gave you for your birthday and drinking the last of the hot chocolate that she’d bought back in the spring. It’s strange - of course it’s strange - but to take control like this is a quiet victory.

Mattie keeps trying to Skype during the good shows and a few years ago you’d have been able to shut that shit right down but now she’s seen the socks and heard you cry like you’re a child again over powdered cocoa and watched you trip over your coffee table in an aborted attempt to practice the waltz and now she doesn’t take you seriously. 

You’d be more annoyed about that but her last text message holds you off.

_It was worth it all to see you find your calm again._

You reread it and try to smile but unbidden comes the memory of Laura’s hands soothing your wet soapy scalp and her lips on your callused, rough hands.

And you know that right now you can feel a ground under you that’s not going to spin away from your feet again; you’ve gone from crawling to walking and one day you might even be running.

But back then? Back then you were soaring.

 

\--

You want to laugh because it’s four in the morning and you can’t tell up from down but there’s a hospital on the other end of the phone and the woman is talking about Laura fucking Hollis and really, it wasn’t like you could ever actually get out of this maze of loss and regret and something that still feels too much like love.

And then you hear “accident” and nothing is so funny anymore.

You’re dressed and there before the sun’s come up. Your heart is beating out of your throat and you don’t know whether to be more alarmed by the feverish sweat making your shirt stick to your back or the nausea brewing in your gut because this is a hospital and you don’t want to bring anything in. But Laura’s there and there’s been an accident and you can’t remember any more except the urgency and the worrying sense that the ground you’ve just learned to trust is about to open up into a chasm under you.

She’s so small and so still, cocooned in blankets and oxygen masks and drips and machines and a dry sob that’s more like a retch forces its way out because she’s a shadow of the force that upended your entire being and you don't know how much of that is even left.

The initial flurry of activity around you both is winding down.

You wonder what “stable” means because you hear the sounds that are thrown in your direction by white coats and green scrubs but they might as well be speaking English across your coffee table all over again.

And then it’s just the two of you.

 

\--

The room doesn’t even have the advantage of silence. Every time your heartbeat begins to return to normal there’s a beep, a buzz, a clatter, and you jump and stare at the monitors you don’t understand before realising that nothing’s changed, that “stable” is still what she is, and the world is still turning on its axis.

So you fill in the gaps, your whisper strange and scratchy and somehow recoiling under the artificial glare of strip lights.

You reminisce with her and it’s like you’re eighty and senile and holding onto each other to make sense of a world that’s passed beyond your understanding, and maybe for you right now that’s the truth.

But your memories soon seem to run trite and false and inappropriate against those intrusive beeps and buzzes.

You’d never cared about inappropriate before you were with her. 

So you try to shield yourself, try to make some stories up, but soon it’s just all the memories you wish you’d made with her and you’d be able to stop except every time you stop and raise your eyes the nausea washes up all over again and you just have to talk because to stop would be to think, and to think would spring the trap, and you know you have to put that off as long as possible.

And soon you’re not telling any stories any more, you’re all out of stories, and all that you have left is the regrets, so you tell her those too. The trap springs.

You didn’t listen. 

You knew how far apart your worlds were. And she was there; she’d struck out into the no man’s land and was on the other side begging you to meet her halfway because it’s a long fucking trek through the dark and the cold and the unknown but you didn’t take a single step to get there. 

And you blamed work and you blamed her friends and you blamed that council estate on the edge of your home city which you can never really escape but they could never have stopped you from doing whatever the hell you please because nothing ever does. 

It’s just you.

 

\--

She wakes long after your words have run out and the first thing you do at hearing her croaking, weak, familiar voice is surge for the button that calls the nurse, but she’s staring at you like she can’t believe that you’re real and to be honest she might have a point, because you still aren’t really sure that you are entirely one hundred percent corporeal and functional right now.

It’s suddenly too intimate and you go to the door but with one word she brings the air back into your lungs. And this isn’t surfacing from the choppy waves of the sea. It’s a lot softer than that because she’s told you to stay. Her eyes are warm and drowsy like you remember and for the first time since she was last in your arms you really believe that you can just exist.

 

\-- 

“She’ll be okay?”

“Absolutely fine. She’ll probably need to get herself a better bike, though.”

 

\--

It turns out that Laura really is _terrible_ at handling adult life and you’ve been unknowingly listed as her emergency contact for almost a year, the last five months of which have seen zero contact between you. 

You know it was a mistake.

You're still here.

Not even Danny Lawrence, who’d almost blown the doors off when she learned that Laura had been in hospital almost 12 hours without her knowledge, can intimidate you into leaving, and Laura is drifting into a peaceful, much needed doze under two pairs of watchful eyes (that keep uneasily meeting).

Danny offers to stay if you have to go somewhere.

You reply that you’ve already phoned work and are staying as long as Laura needs and she isn’t _yours_  anymore but Jesus it’s satisfying. You say you know she must be busy with her postgrad work and you have it covered here.

Neither of you leave. 

She sees your tapping fingers and offers you gum. It isn’t the nicotine you crave, but you take a strip. You don’t say anything: you know you don’t have to.

 

\-- 

This isn’t a made for TV movie. Laura's recovery doesn't climax with a declaration of love and a passionate kiss for you; instead you get a lot of frustrated confused repetitions and loo escort duty. Laura and you spend a lot of time sneaking each other disbelieving glances when you think you aren't looking and your conversations are awkward and filled with banalities. It doesn’t help that every time you look at her you’re torn between the Laura of the last half-year who you don’t know, whose skull almost got crushed in the road thanks to her ancient bike’s complete unreliability, and the Laura of before that, whose body and whose face you are as familiar with as your own, and with whom you've shared the most intimate of experiences. Words seem a little superfluous in the face of that. 

But every time you get up to leave the room she asks where you’re going and you begin to think that the past and present aren't necessarily irreconcilable.

 

\--

Danny takes her home at the weekend, when you’re at work paying Peter and Dieter back for covering your shifts. You wonder if that’s the end of it. 

And you know now that you still have so much to say because, finally, she deserves to know why. What happened between you must still be a fill-the-gaps exercise for her, the summary nonsensical and the conclusion half-missing. Now you've found the words she needs to finish it off. 

Naturally, you don’t know how you feel when you read the text that thanks you for all your selfless support in hospital and asks you to coffee to make up for it.

You could refuse, say you have to work, shrug her off and focus on what Mattie taught you - to protect yourself, and the small joys you can call entirely your own.

Instead you text her back with a time and a place.

 

\--

Christ, it's hard. It's humiliating and painful and uncomfortable and fucking _hard_.

At first you don't know where to start. After an awkward 20 minutes of near-silence over black coffee, you spit the words out, feel the release they bring, and realise you don't know where to stop. No one else could have ever gotten so many words out of you.

She covers your hand with her own. Then she snaps back her fingers as if they're burned.

But after that little coffee date there's another. And another. And gradually you stop talking about the past and start talking about the present.

 

\-- 

This Christmas you break tradition and avoid the market at Alexanderplatz. Instead you take the U-Bahn to Potsdamer Platz and venture into the sudden, unexpected remoteness of the Tiergarten. It’s quiet and cold and your breath hangs in the air, forming fine mist in the slight snowfall.

The _Goldfischteich_ has frozen over and its extraordinary stillness sends shivers up your skin that aren’t wholly unpleasant. It’s as though there is no one else on the planet and the notion doesn’t scare you as much as you’d have thought, because your hands are bare and still warm. Your heart is still beating.

Next to you, she reaches out and takes your hand loosely, her fingers barely daring to curl around yours. With one easy movement you could escape her touch.

You have a choice to make, just like the choice you made two years ago when you fisted her hair in your hands and smiled in triumph against her lips.

But it's not the same. You're not the same. Laura’s not the same.

You both know better now.

So you lace her fingers with yours and tug her back against your chest as you stare at that hanging suspended lake in all its impermanence and all its beauty. You can feel your hearts beating: not together, but out of time, in their own rhythms.

You take comfort in that when you press your lips to her temple, because Laura is more than a fix to the holes in you, and you are more than a puzzle to quell the questions in her.

It’s going to take time to find out what she is all over again. But it’s time, you think as she turns in your arms and finally meets your eyes (with an expression like the welcome spring), that you’re willing to spend.

**Author's Note:**

> they made it :')
> 
> this is not an instinctive writing style for me so please please please let me know your feedback in the comments if you have time or holla via tumblr @ viele-kleine-leute because this was really hard to put into the words i wanted
> 
> (also i may have written at least a quarter of this drunk)
> 
> you're all beautiful tropical fish xoxoxo


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